“You demonic concubine.” —The teenage reincarnation of Trotsky (Jay Baruchel), addressing the head of the school board in The Trotsky; screenplay by writer-director Jacob Tierney

Right about now might be the time to mention my strange obsession with Trostky in drama, which is the likely result of having directed a student production of David Ives’s Variations on the Death of Trotsky (from which this post takes its title).

Anyway, the film’s page at the TIFF website looks weirdly compelling, as does the description:

Jacob Tierney’s hilarious The Trotsky follows Leon Bronstein (the phenomenal Jay Baruchel, in a star-making performance), a precocious Montreal teen who fervently believes himself to be the reincarnation of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He’s determined to duplicate every aspect of Trotsky’s life, including being exiled, at least twice, and ultimately assassinated. His most pressing issues right now, though, are finding his Lenin and an older wife, preferably named Alexandra.

It goes on to discuss, well, this:

One of the most appealing aspects of the movie is that it is unreservedly Canadian and packed with very specific, slyly funny cultural references, ranging from gags about the French-English divide in Montreal to Ben Mulroney’s ancestry.

Can’t really argue with absurdist Canadian political comedy, I’d think.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

Temporary People is subtitled “a fable”. I’ll admit that, initially, this threw me; given the extent to which you’ve created a distinct country and given it a visible, viable history– a degree of realism I don’t generally associate with fables. Did you know from the start that you’d be using this terminology? And if not, at what point did the book shift from Temporary People: a novel to Temporary People: a fable?
The idea to actually call Temporary People a fable came very late in the game, though the sense that what I was writing was indeed exactly that seemed to resonate within me for some time. I purposely called TP a fable as, to me, it is precisely that, though as you note, not in the traditional way people think of a fable. For me, TP has a moral center, it is a wild story of the quixotic turned on its head, with characters large and small, and I wanted there to be this sense of telling a tale. I could, of course, have left the fable reference off, but I like the association, the idea that here is a tale, modernly set yes, with factual and historical references, and yet completely separate and timeless like – well – a fable.

How much of the history of Bamerita had you worked out before you began writing the novel?
Again, like my use of the word ‘fable’ the idea of having Bamerita be this unique floating space in the world was there from the start, but the actual historical context evolved as the novel went through its many drafts.

Was Bamerita specifically based on any countries? Given its dictator’s obsession with films and filmmaking, I found myself thinking of North Korea more than once while reading the novel.
Not one specific country, no, though my vision has always been a Latin/Central American flavor, a bit of Marquez’s vision, and then with traces of Spain under Franco thrown in. There are so many countries today with madmen and despots at the helm, and as I read obsessively about all of them, Bamerita became a composite.

The novel’s treatment of revolution kept anticipating my comments on it: you’d mention popular music in the context of the novel’s revolution, I’d think “Czechoslovakia”, and within a few pages, you’d mention the unrest there in 1968; the same was true in the discussion of general strikes, which both called to mind and explicitly referenced Poland in the early 1980s. The events of Temporary People, then, seem like a kind of meta-revolution. To what extent have you found that revolutions tend to (or don’t tend to) build on what has come before?
If you mean the repetition in a single country as happens in Bamerita, the cycle is almost unavoidable because it becomes part of the culture, the fabric of the nation, sadly enough. If you mean revolutions in general, certainly there are aspects of revolution that are endemic to the process, regardless of where they take place. The eternal push and shove between powers, the internal struggle as it comes to a head, and then those cast to the outside after a revolution, begin to seed the same process again and again.

On the Dzanc side, you’ve recently announced the launch of online literary journal The Collagist. What prompted this? Do you consider it a part of Dzanc, or something distinct?
The Collagist is most definitely a part of Dzanc. We – Dan Wickett and myself – had discussed doing a journal for a while, and when we landed Matt Bell as our editor, we decided to take the jump. We simply want to use our platform to continue to bring the best writing to a large audience. The Collagist will have fiction, nonfiction, poetry, reviews, novel excerpts, editorials and feature some of the best new and established writers working today. Our first issue will be out Aug 15 and when you see the material we have lined up, and the writers, I think you will be blown away.

[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]

Both How the Broken Lead the Blind and The Collectors have appeared as chapbooks, and both are now sold out. What about the chapbook format appeals to you? How do you feel about the limited-edition nature of both — ideally, would you like to see both reprinted, combined into a larger collection, or something else?
What I like about the fiction chapbook is the way it can highlight forms that are hard to pull off in full length books. With the emergence of flash fiction as a popular form, there’s a need for a way to put together collections, but (generally speaking) short-shorts become less satisfying when too many of them are read in a row. A chapbook containing ten to fifteen shorts is much more palatable, and much more likely to have the kind of resonance that good books provide.  It’s also a great form for the novella, since they are so hard to publish in traditional literary magazines—I feel like that’s the biggest growth area for chapbooks, and I expect we’ll see more and more of them published in this format.

The limited edition nature of the books has been interesting. I’ve been lucky with how fast they’ve sold—How the Broken Lead the Blind sold out in pre-orders, and The Collectors was for sale for about a month total—and I’m extremely grateful for that. I do feel bad that there are people who wanted the books who couldn’t get them in time, but I think both Willows Wept and Caketrain have plans to make them available electronically at some point in the future, so hopefully everyone who wants to read them will still be able to. (That’s actually something that’s very important to me—I’d like to be able to offer free electronic copies of every book I have the good fortune to publish). As far as reprinting them in other books go, I just finished a full-length collection manuscript, and if it were to be printed exactly as it is now, there’ll be two stories from How the Broken Lead the Blind and the entirety of The Collectors within. So hopefully they’ll get a new life in print sooner or later.

When and how did you first become interested in the Collyer brothers?
I first read about the Collyer brothers in a book I ran across while I was staying in a hunting lodge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula while I was in town for my grandmother’s 85th birthday last year. It was only a few paragraphs, but still enough for me to recognize that they’d make great characters. I came home a few days later and looked them up, and started writing the same day, with the first section of the book (probably the only one I wrote in order). From there, I did a lot of research over a very short period and then I tried not to do any more—Historical accuracy wasn’t the goal, and so a more impressionistic brand of research seemed best.

The narrator of the “4″ sections of The Collectors has certain authorial traits — particularly in terms of how he circles the action but seems to do so from a retrospective point. Did you know from the outset that the story would include this viewpoint? And how close is this narrator to the perspective of Matt Bell?
As I was writing, the authorial narrator started to appear in Langley’s sections first, and then in his own. I think this was probably inevitable, for a historical book like mine to work—The time scale is so small, and the outcome so definite. The tension in the book can’t come from whether or not they’re going to live, since anyone who’s familiar with their history knows they’re doomed, and steps had to be taken to dramatize the events around them to make up for that (this is also part of the reason for the two sections about the men who independently found the bodies of the brothers). I think the authorial narrator also allowed me to be more forthcoming, as it gave me both the ability to get closer to my version of the Collyers, since they’re separated from each other the whole book, and so there would have been no interaction without this intrusion.

The narrator isn’t very a nice guy, of course, because he’s the antagonist of the story: he inflates his own importance, lies to Langley, offers false hope and some false redemption, and accidentally traps himself in their house because he believes that the story is something he can control. Like Langley, he is defined and motivated by his obsessive gathering, and by a perhaps hopeless attempt to understand and complete the obsession in some meaningful way. A few of these qualities are reflective of who I am at times, for better or worse, but most are whole fabrications added for the purpose of making the book work.

That said, I did walk around for months thinking about these two brothers and wondering about their relationship. I rewrote lists of their possessions over and over until they were mine too, trying to see what connected the things they kept to the people they were, or—perhaps more importantly—to the people I wanted them to be for my own purposes. There were definitely days when I had trouble leaving them behind, and I think the ending of the book was written as much for me as for the story itself—It was one way to both complete the action and to allow myself to act out leaving this particular obsession behind. It wasn’t the last section I wrote, so I’m not sure it was completely successful.

I know this might make me sound kind of crazy and self-fixated now, but it really was on my mind at the time. I’m not a very autobiographical writer, so putting this kind of character in the book was something new for me, and therefore both interesting and somewhat uncomfortable.

How did you become involved with Hobart? Has your work as an editor there had any effect on your writing?
One of my very first fiction publications was in the fifth issue of Hobart, back in 2005, and I had an essay in the Games issue last year. Some months later, Aaron Burch invited me to come on board and edit the web edition (along with Jensen Whelan), and I’m very grateful for the opportunity. I’m obviously biased, but I think Hobart is one of the best literary magazines around, and it’s only going to keep getting better as it grows.

I’m not sure that working for Hobart (or for any of the other places I’ve been an editor) has had a direct impact on my writing, but it has helped me as a reader and an editor—There’s nothing quite like reading a couple hundred submissions to get a really good idea of what you like in a story and what you don’t, and to start formulating reasons why. One of the most educational parts of the process is when I get down to the last dozen submissions or so, and need to pick a final four for an issue. At that point, you’re down to twelve publishable, exciting stories, and finding the small qualities that separate them is very interesting (and hard).

How do games and gameplay factor in to your writing? “Mario’s Three Lives” comes to mind, as does — in a looser sense — “Hold On To Your Vacuum”.
Games are a rich source of inspiration, in so many ways—They provide forms and structure, like all storytelling mediums do, and they also offer new examples of how people interact with stories.  I think older video games appeal to me partly because they’re so often blank slates attached to the mythic framework of the hero and the quest. The stories are so minimal, and often they were relegated to the instruction manual, or didn’t make any sense whatsoever. For instance, to find out the story of the original Donkey Kong, you had to read the side of the arcade cabinet, as there’s absolutely nothing in the game itself. Games also have a Sisyphean aspect to them, where the character and the player are both asked to do the same thing over and over again. “The princess is in another castle!” and so on. And then of course there’s the free will problem, at least as it appears from the avatar’s point of view—even a modern video game character with a fully cinematic storyline meant to evoke real emotion from the player is still just a shell, incapable of independent action—which is much like a character in a novel, with the only difference being where the inputs are. In a novel, it’s the writer’s job to bring a character to life, while in a game it’s the player’s. (That’s an imperfect distinction, obviously—both readers and game designers have big roles to play in these relationships as well.)

In “Hold On To Your Vacuum,” there’s obviously a game involved, but it’s a fairly sadistic one, both physically with Teacher’s repeated drilling into the narrator’s skull, and also because the game revolves around something that isn’t fun (and shouldn’t be): the letting go of guilt and shame, and being freed of both of those things whether or not the protagonist has earned that freedom. For me, part of that story is the protagonist learning that the game is wrong, at least as it’s being played—he doesn’t want to be freed of his guilt, but to redeem himself for these things he’s done, and so he starts to play the game in a way that he thinks will help him do that.

To link this back to games and gameplay, I think it’s an example of another quality of games that only a certain percentage of players ever take advantage of: The freedom to play the game in any way they choose, whether or not the makers intended it. There are consequences, of course—often the game punishes players who don’t play by the rules, even if it’s just something as mild as the absence of a visible score by which to gauge their “progress.” It’s in places like this where I think video games reflect life best: There are rules you’re meant to play by, but they’re not absolutes, and sometimes the best times are when you play the game your own way, regardless of whether anyone else understands or appreciates what you’re up to.

I’ve been meaning to link to Alan Jacobs’s Text Patterns — which began its life at said now-defunct site — for a while now, as I find to be one of the smarter takes on the broader questions and implications raised by an increase in reading on digital devices. (You’ll note that it’s now included in the sidebar.) But I’m also curious as to whether a work of criticism, whether a standalone review or ongoing coverage, regardless of its author’s politics, can be inherently considered to be of the right or the left. Putting it another way: if the same record review appears in Slate, the American Prospect, or the National Review, does its context matter? And while I realize I’m nowhere near the first to ask these questions, they remain worth asking — and as the idea of a more ideologically polarized media is predicted by some, I suspect they’ll continue to be relevant.

I’m reminded of J.D. Considine’s Experience Music Project Pop Conference presentation from last year — here summarized by Ned Raggett — in which he looked into the inherent politics of pop songs. Some further digging through the Pop Conference vaults also brings up Michael Daddino’s piece on the aforementioned National Review and its music criticism since the 1960s. Which, in many ways, echoes the Homans piece that brought us here in the first place.

Cautionary tales? Absolutely. But at the same time — thinking on issues of media — I wonder if we’re missing the point. When I hear talk of publishing being boosted by a theoretical shift of books to the “impulse buy” category, for instance. Or, as Edward Champion puts it in a piece on Nick Bilton’s Tools of Change address:

Instant gratification certainly gratifies, but how precisely do all the doodads aid rumination? Maybe there are some circumstances in which it’s probably best not to have it immediately.

Right about now seems like a good time to reference the Slow Listening Movement* as well.

*-link updated, 2.26.09. More randomly, those seeking a chuckle may want to make their way here. It relates to books, and therefore is absolutely relevant.

And isn’t the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, with his vociferous curses against the United States, the small, fat, childish king who makes appearances in the Tintin and Capitan Trueno adventures? (It’s easy to imagine Chavez dressed in a pointed crown and christening robe and baring his barrel chest.)

Not all that randomly, the above excerpt immediately put me in mind of Thomas McCarthy’s Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Which, in turn, reminded me that I need to actually, well, read some Tintin. (As well as the work of Rutu Modan.)

I wasn’t present when any of this took place, so my perspective is somewhat limited. That said, though, there is something that’s been unsettling me since I first heard about it. Consider the case of a country who, after eight years in office, votes out a head of state who by this point has become widely unpopular. The people take to the streets in celebration and, in some cases, are met with resistance from riot gear-clad police. In the abstract — if we were reading about this taking place somewhere distant, I suspect that we’d be appalled.

Normally, the line for each district is fairly short, especially in the early hours of the day. Five people before you, maybe seven: you check in, you step inside the booth, you make your choice. Or, to get all Tanner 88: you exercise your right to vote.

Today was a little different. The line for the information desk — i.e. where you find out what your district is based on your address — trailed up the stairs leading down to where you actually vote. I proceeded to the 99th District table to check in; the line seemed longer than normal, but not by much. Okay, I thought.

And then I checked in, and realized that the line to actually vote was a completely different one, and that it was three or four times the size of the check-in line. Multiply that by the five or six districts using the same polling place — though the 99th was particularly crowded, due to one of the two machines allocated to it being down — and you might get a sense of just how packed things were.

Once I’d cast my ballot and headed back up the steps to Leonard Street, thirty-odd minutes after arriving, one thing stood out: it had gotten even more crowded. As someone who occasionally vents his frustration over low voter turnouts, it made for an encouraging start to the day.